Bellowing Like Iron Maiden, but Very, Very Sensitive

By TAMMY LA GORCE

Published: November 7, 2004

WHEN quizzing Gerard Way about how he put together rock's latest best hope for revolutionizing geekdom, it's important to give him plenty of time before he wolfs out, slinks into his ticked-off rock 'n' roll skin.

Wait too long, and the cartoonish geek punk who leads My Chemical Romance -- the guy dipped in the requisite all black, with thick mascara and smudges of orange shadow beneath both eyes before a recent show at Irving Plaza in Manhattan -- overtakes the boyish 27-year-old from Belleville given to explaining the band's progression through stories about his grandma and his Dungeons and Dragons addiction.

The wrong side of the wolf-out equation can unnerve fans, too, including the tongue-pierced crew lined up around the club hours early to thrust cellphone cameras at Mr. Way as he shuffled in. ''A lot of kids get disappointed,'' Mr. Way said, joining his four fellow band members on a velvet sofa in a cordoned-off club lobby. ''They expect me to be, like, 'Bwaah,''' -- his eyes going bogeyman big -- ''If I spend a minute with them, they end up saying, 'Wow, you're a nice, normal guy.' They hate it when they catch me out of my makeup.''

''For some of them it's a relief, though,'' he added, swiveling around for reinforcement from the less-creepified musicians sprawled about him. Which is more what Mr. Way -- along with his bassist and brother, Mikey; Ray Toro, a guitarist from Belleville; Frank Iero, a guitarist from Kearny; and the Chicago-area drummer Bob Bryer -- is going for, especially on ''Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge,'' the act's first major-label CD, released last June and holding steady at 125,000 units sold after a blastoff from Eyeball Records, an independent label in Kearny for whom they recorded ''I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.''

''Three Cheers'' barged onto the Billboard 200 album chart at No.103, and has hovered in the 120's since as the group's brand of geek punk has been profiled in a range of rock 'n' roll glossies, showcased on an MTV2 video and shown off during an overseas tour.

Get to know the band, and the ''Revenge'' part of the new album's title tugs hard at comparisons with the ''Revenge of the Nerds'' movies. The music, which owes more to a mash-up of Iron Maiden and Morrissey than the Britpop influences Mr. Way cites, betrays no traces of pocket-protector angst, but the conversation is loaded with them. Not only are they difficult to ignore, they are heartily embraced.

''Three Cheers,'' on Reprise/Warner Music Group, ''is a concept album about a man who comes back from the dead to kill people who shut him out for not fitting in during his lifetime,'' Mr. Way explained. ''The band lent itself to that sort of thing. All of us grew up as geeks, getting picked on and being told we weren't good enough.'' He managed to skim past his pre-band, post-School of Visual Arts life as an out-of-work animator.

You can practically hear the Columbine-redux charges rolling in, but ''it's not meant to inspire you to acts of violence. Everything is a metaphor,'' Mr. Way said of the album, being seconded by vigorous nods from Mr. Iero, a self-described loner -- the kind of kid who wore Army jackets around Kearny High.

Although it has been productive artistically, Mr. Way says his chronic guilt weighs on him. When he is not beating himself up for plucking his then 19-year-old brother out of William Paterson University in 2001 to play bass, angering their parents -- a service manager at a Bloomfield car dealership and a former hairdresser -- he incriminates himself lyrically in songs like ''Helena,'' which is ''kind of an angry open letter to myself about the situation I've put us in,'' he said. ''We're away from home so much, everybody misses their loved ones. I feel very responsible.''

The stung conscience pokes through the lyrics and into the recording studio, where Mr. Way gasps for breath, seemingly struggling to hold a song together as a tangle of guitars and drums fume behind him.

''I miss Jersey so much; I'm really connected to it,'' Mr. Iero said, unintentionally reinforcing Mr. Way's guilt in a trail-off from a conversation about early shows in friends' basements. ''I love the big malls, the diners. You go to the Tick Tock, and you sit there and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes all night. There's nothing like it.'' Displaying an intensity sturdy enough to win him a reputation as the moody-broody one, he sneered at Los Angeles, where the band lived while filming its video.

Mr. Toro, whose Art Garfunkel hair and guilelessness contribute to his ''Wayne's World'' vibe, dreams of days down the Shore while on the road. And Mr. Way, true to form, plans weird getaways when the band members return home. After the Irving Plaza gig, he intended to ''go up to some town where there's supposed to be all this haunted stuff. It's got to be up near West Milford.''

He could have gone on -- about ''Aqua Teen Hunger Force,'' his favorite TV show, or the nagging sense he gets that he always says stupid things during interviews -- but a pop-in by a tour manager called My Chemical Romance's collective attention to the clock. The countdown to the show had begun, which meant it was time to harness the angry geek within for some onstage catharsis.

Mr. Way put it another way: he had some wolfing out to do.

Photos: My Chemical Romance, led by Gerard Way (left), has deep roots in Belleville and Kearny. (Photographs by George M. Gutierrez for The New York Times)